Tuesday, 30 October 2007

Alexandre da Cunha recycles discarded objects and defunct consumer items—everything from old furniture to beach towels and car wheel hubs—to create his sculptures and installations. These cheap, throwaway materials often take on a functional appearance. In a sense, Da Cunha improvises on the concept of the readymade by reusing everyday objects in ways that reflect on those objects' specific histories and aesthetics. The artist is concerned with issues of formalism, such as shape, technique, and materiality, but his practice also has an essential playfulness and humor. Moreover, it expresses a wider concern with the human condition, in particular a critique of the distribution of wealth in his native Brazil. Born in 1969 in Rio de Janeiro, da Cunha now lives and works in London. He has had solo exhibitions at the Pacos das Artes, São Paulo (2005) and the Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2005), while his work has been included in the Prague Biennial (2005) and the Venice Biennial (2003).

Jens Hoffmann (JH): How do you choose the objects that you alter?Alexandre da Cunha (AC): I am attracted to them either because of what they signify in society or because of their specific forms, colors, and materials. I decontextualize them, modify them, and create artworks that often mimic modernist sculptures. Yet, when one looks more carefully, these modernist forms turn out to originate in everyday life. Often they are inexpensive or perhaps defunct consumer items.

JH: What do you think of the idea of your works as contemporary reinterpretations of Arte Povera?AC: Obviously Arte Povera was very specific to the Italian context in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but I think some of my works could be regarded along similar lines. In the end it is all much less complicated, though. I started using "poor" materials when I was studying art simply because I could not afford to buy anything expensive. Later I realized that my choice was not based on how much money I could invest in my process, but on the challenge of making viewers appreciate something that is made of materials whose monetary value is negligible. It is neither the technique nor the beauty of the material itself that is special, seductive, or valuable for me. It is the challenge of turning something "poor" into something rich in meaning.

JH: Let us talk about some of your works. Maybe you can speak a little bit about the series of sculptures that incorporate old skateboards and look like large ceiling fans?AC: Those pieces are made of found skateboards, household utensils, and fittings. Their titles are based on either the brand names of the boards or writing that had been added to them. One I made in 2006 is titled Greasy, which was written under the board. The idea of making a ceiling fan also relates to tropical places such as Brazil, my home country, where such fans are common household objects. These works offer an approach to appropriation that goes beyond the plain use of the object itself. The found boards have scratches and stickers that tell a story, a sort of personal narrative of the former user, and they refer to a lifestyle that is very familiar to many but in this case not something I can very much relate to. They are abandoned trophies or, to me, fragments of found secrets that have been exposed. They are also about forcing together objects that belong to completely different spheres of culture.

JH: The first work of yours that I saw was They Really Work for Me (2001) at the 50th Venice Biennale. I liked the idea of artworks as crutches very much. I also remember that it was unclear whether they were intended to be used.AC: That work was part of a series of sculptures that looked like homemade crutches. I continued doing them until about 2003. They are made of isolated volumes of used, soft clothing and cleaning materials such as sponges that form padded elements, which are fixed with adhesive tape to broomsticks of various colors and sizes. Upside down, they suggest odd, improvised orthopedic devices.

JH: Sometimes you make direct references to well-known artworks such as the stripe paintings of Daniel Buren or the columns of Constantin Brancusi, two icons of twentieth-century art. Can you elaborate on this?AC: The first work in my ongoing series titled Deck Paintings (begun 2005) started in London, where I saw canvas deck chairs with stripes of the same width and colors as in some of Buren's paintings. All I did was take the canvas off the chairs and put it onto stretchers. The column series you mention is titled Platinum, also begun in 2005. Those pieces are made of mass-produced metal bowls and ice buckets, arranged to mimic modernist sculpture. I was interested in the fact that Buren and Brancusi often worked in series, following a strict set of rules. I think my pieces talk about the playfulness that might be hidden behind the severe look of those historic, iconic works. I also wanted to explore questions of authenticity, authorship, and uniqueness. Those issues run through all of my work.

JH: Terracotta Ebony (2006) is also an interesting piece to talk about. It is another sculptural work that, upon first glance, looks like a minimalist sculpture.AC: Terracotta Ebony is also part of a series, which I made by combining the heads of different-colored toilet plungers to form abstract geometric sculptures. I was intrigued by the colors and shapes of the plunger heads, but also by the metaphor of art as a plunger of some sort.

JH: Your practice seems to combine a Latin American artistic sensibility, particularly with respect to your alteration of found objects, with a Neo-Formalist style that has emerged specifically in Europe over the last five years. Would you say that this observation is accurate?AC: Yes, you are definitely touching on the right issues. While form is certainly important to me because I have lived in Europe for a number of years now and have seen a revival of that sort of work, my interest in Neo-Formalism also relates to my formation as an artist in Brazil, where Modernism played a crucial role in the development of the arts—not only visual art but also architecture and literature, for example. This specifically Brazilian modernist legacy has only recently been disseminated internationally, but in Brazil it has always been the core of the education of young artists. The Neo-Concrete movement, with its aim to revitalize the relationship between the individual and his or her environment, has been very important for me. Yet unlike the Neo-Concrete artists in the 1960s and 1970s, I think that many artists of my generation who are concerned with the legacy of Modernism are revisiting it with a new approach that is based more on shapes than slogans and ideologies. It is maybe a more introverted form of artistic practice, which has at its center a genuine interest in techniques and materiality—something that would have seemed rather reactionary only a few years ago but now seems pertinent. What I found in Europe and specifically in London, where I live now, is a similar interest in modernist history among artists of my generation. It is a return to a more classic notion of Formalism, and it certainly has had an influence on me.

JH: I would add, though, that in contrast to pure Formalism, context plays an important role in your case. You have a very specific way of appropriating found objects.AC: This is correct, but let me first explain my relationship to Brazil, as I think it is relevant to your question. I have lived in London now for quite some time, and its distance from Brazil and my experiences when I go back there have made me realize a lot of things about my culture and my home country that I was not aware of before. I have begun to understand certain aspects that for the most part I simply rejected or did not even notice when I was living there.

JH: What you say is interesting, considering the fact that the gesture of the readymade is something truly European.AC: In Brazil, as you know, the claim that we have formed parts of our cultural identity by cannibalizing other cultures is very significant. The idea of the found object, which is in itself a cannibalization, might be one of those things we have appropriated in this way. What is important to note, though, and this also relates to the idea of cannibalization, is that everything we take in is digested in a very specifically Brazilian way. I am altering most of the objects I use, so they are not readymades in the classic Duchampian sense. They are for the most part fairly universal, but they also carry the specific context of where they come from—a particular aesthetics and history. Obviously many of them are things I have seen and observed in Brazil. Maybe it is a kind of tropicalization of the concept of the readymade. I also notice how people in Brazil improvise objects in everyday life, and some of my sculptures carry that improvised quality into the gallery space. I am talking about objects that are supposed to be used for a specific purpose, but once they cannot fulfill that original function any more, people use them for other things.

JH: I know you made a piece about repurposing old car tires.AC: The Glaze works (2005) are made of car wheels turned inside out after being cut, to make the shape of a planter. They are very common in suburban areas in Latin America, where people use them as decorative and utilitarian pots for plants. I wanted to highlight the existence of the object, applying a glossy, elaborate, painted surface with modernist echoes and then bringing it into the aura of a gallery space. The titles—for example Vegas, Savanna, Capri, or Monterey—are the names of the colors I used, and they also refer to a change of status, where the paint and its name have the power to lead you to another, perhaps imaginary, place.

JH: You work a lot in series. Has this something to do with the fact that most of your pieces are based on mass-produced objects?AC: That might be part of it, but to be honest I never know if a first piece might originate a series or not. I only find that out when I get close to the end of making it. There are never too many works in the same series, either; I like to think of them as small families with interrelated dynamics. The other aspect of working in series has to do with realizing that there are different possibilities with respect to the physical manifestation of a work. So if I make three, four, or five variations of the same piece, each one expresses a different aspect of the overall idea.

JH: Recently your works have become more political and critical. I am thinking for example about the Velour series of 2006.AC: Those works are made of beach towels, household materials such as curtain rods, metal fittings, ribbons, and adhesive tape to form pieces that ultimately look like flags. They play with the idea of identity, and the stereotypical iconography of tropical and exotic countries. I see them as a response to how cultures can be misunderstood and misrepresented—using an image of a tiger or a girl in a bikini, for example, as if it was an official national symbol. But I do not have the ambition to contextualize my work in a political discourse that focuses on social or cultural differences. I can raise issues through my practice that might provoke someone to have a new perception of the world, or engage in a momentary state of contemplation, and I am happy with just that. When I am transforming a toilet plunger into what looks like a rare terra-cotta pot, I am trying to deal with subjects related to status and class, the conflict between opposing forces, but there are many other meanings as well. There might be a social nuance in the context of the piece, but it is essentially about belief, illusion, and frustration, which are universal human feelings unrelated to any particular social condition.

JH: What are you planning to present in your exhibition at the Wattis Institute?AC: Currently I am working on a series using preprinted industrial and found materials. The printed items range from beach towels to flags to banners. Some of them are intended to be used as bedsheets, curtains, or domestic partitions. The content of the printed images is often very loaded. Some of them are iconics such as Bob Marley or Mahatma Gandhi or the rainbow flag, but incorporated into a pattern, as if the ideological content is secondary to a mood or trend. I am interested in the slightly neglectful use of those images and the possible confusion among identity, consumerism, and taste. For San Francisco I am making a piece that incorporates versions of the rainbow flag, from Buddhism or Judaism, for instance, where the rainbow serves as a metaphor for inclusion, diversity, freedom, and hope.

Monday, 29 October 2007

A Spoken Word Exhibition, and a Series of Spoken Word RetrospectivesNov 1 - Nov7 2007

Guest curator Mathieu Copeland presents a spoken word exhibition at the Swiss Institute. The exhibition consists of artworks repeated by the Institute‘s staff. By leaving the gallery space empty and making works available only on demand, Copeland initiates an exchange between spectators and gallery staff.

During the exhibition the Swiss Institute opens from noon to midnight. A Series of Spoken Word Events will take place every evening at 6pm.

Schedule for live performances :

1) OPENING : Nov 1 Karl HolmqvistKarl Holmqvist's use of the spoken word goes back to early nineties New York (St Marks Poetry Project, Pyramid Club, ABC No Rio). He believes in the communal and emotive aspects of the spoken and the act of listening as a counter balance to the more isolatory and authoritative qualities of the written word. Transformatory potentials can be said to be explored through the spoken word as it allows the entering of a text through stage performance.

2) Nov 2 Michael Portnoy - A Seminar in Sublingual Carnage.“It will last approximately 30 minutes and will instruct viewers in all manner of atrocities that may be waged against (and occasionally with) the Word. This event may be seen as a thoracic scrub brush, diaphragmatic mud-dancing, a Word Jock energy session...”

3) Nov 3 An evening of the book(s)18.00 : A Reading from Mai-Thu Perret’s the Crystal Frontier“For the past few years, Mai-Thu Perret has been writing The Crystal Frontier, a fictional account of a feminist commune founded by five women in the Southwestern United States. In no way, shape or form a finished document, The Crystal Frontier consists of diary entries by its female protagonists who reflect on the lives they left behind, the reasons they left, and their personal hopes and hardships in pioneering a utopian community. Perret, who studied English literature at Cambridge, is more interested in character development than setting. No More City, an extract from The Crystal Frontier, reveals the escapist impulse motivating the women. Whereas one journal entry may be reminiscent of Willa Cather, another may come across as the delightfully convoluted, ideological rant of a disgruntled graduate student frustrated by her inability to translate, say, Monique Wittig into a meaningful “praxis.””.Extracts from Hamza Walker

18.30 : 2 or 3 things I know about books, an event by Raimundas Malasauskas‘2 or 3 things I know about books’ is based on the famous scene from Jean Luc Godard’s ‘2 or 3 things I know about her’, where two readers are seated on a table covered with books, randomly reading sentences and paragraphs from randomly selected books.In this performance, a reader selects randomly from the pile of books present on the table paragraphs to be read, whilst the other protagonist is writing on a laptop, not handwriting, the text transmitted online in real time.Assuming that the person who is reading (as well as the one that is writing) is doing some reinterpretation of the text while adding bits and pieces from the memory or from the heart, and the same applying to the person writing, this performance becomes an artistic act on the part of the both, generating live a composite new text based on chance, movement and knowledge.

4) Nov 4 Robert BarryA live performance by Robert Barry. In an extract to a discussion held with Holger Weh in 1995, Barry developed on his use of the word : “And from the projections then I started making sound pieces. In a room where there’s a projection it's usually dark, and you focus on one image in front of you, and that’s a certain kind of situation. But with a sound piece, where you hear the words spoken every 30 seconds or so, you’re in a lit room and you’re surrounded by the environment. You can hear things going on outside the gallery, or people are talking to each other. It's a more social situation – you’re not focused on one thing. So it's kind of the opposite of the projections. This is the way I was working”.

5) Nov 5 King MobBegan in 1998, King Mob is a label sporting only the Spoken Word, and has released readings by the likes as Nick Cave, Charles Bukowski, Stewart Home, or Ian Sinclair. The Swiss Institute will pay its respect to the king in an evening devoted to these recordings and will welcome a special guest to do a live reading.It’s proclamation reads: “Music begone! (it’s good to talk). All music is dead, reduced to nothing more than competing background noise. Only the human voice can save you, sooth you, encompass & ignite your dreams. The King Mob is forced therefore to declare a war on musics / curfew the musician / silence the Din. Seize the rehearsal room, padlock it shut. Good folk demand passage of a bill for a 200 fold tax on every ownership of strings, picks, amplifiers, and that bloody banging drum (acoustic or mechanical). A license shall be required to consume any music & shall be refused with no recourse. We call for the shipping forecast to replace the national anthem. Poets & Writers become the new pop stars & exceed our expectations. Anyone caught grooving will be shot (there’s a kind of hush all over the world tonight). THE LOST CHORD IS THE VOCAL CHORD”.The King Mob (A.D 98)

6) Nov 6 David Medalla - "Four Aces: Towards a nano theatre of Utter Meaninglessness". Duration of my performance: exactly 60 minutes. My performance is a participatory art event. I am looking forward to the collaboration of sixteen handsome young men of different nationalities. I will instruct them on simple movements to make in the course of the performance. They have to be lithe and agile and able to make graceful actions that also relate to break-dancing movements. They don't have to be dancers, although dancers are welcome.Incidentally, the 16 young men will have to perform with naked torsos and on bare feet. They will wear a simple costume similar to the breech-cloth of Native Americans. Alas, there will be no fee, but I will give each of the 16 young men an original art work which I will make in New York. And there will be refreshments. Spectators at the performance will also be invited to inter-act, by means of sounds, hand gestures (kinetic mudras) and spoken words with the 16 young men and myself.

Sunday, 21 October 2007

Playback is a project (an exhibition, a publication, some parallel events) opening mid October 2007 at the ARC/Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. It focuses on incursions of visual artists in the realm of music : it will gather both music videos directed by visual artists and produced for a label, as well as videos inspired by/anchored in the music video format : an underknown (even though very common) practice among the artists.

Playback combines therefore approximatively 50 videos by emerging and established artists realized between the beginning of the 1980’s and today.

A music video is by definition a short piece which duration and visual rhythm are synchronized and determined by a song music (being either pre-existing or conceived in parallel), beyond the model of an original movie soundtrack.

The commercial music video – often seen as a manipulative (lip-synch) or matchist and imperialist power remains therefore often disregarded and dismissed, despite an often experimental form and a content questioning (even indirectly) traditional social, racial, sexual identities and representations.

Contradictory in a sense with the so called ‘intemporality’ of art, founded on its ability to support punctual and intensive repetition, music video embodies an illicit and attractive format towards artists.

In itself a global art work and a daily consumption object, music videos invite to rethink the exhibition format and to invent a proper presentation display underscoring an inherent televisual identity. Designed by a music video ‘set designer’, the specific scenography will create 4 idiomatic sets (a tv room, a karaoke cabin, a tv shop, a gym) hosting different thematic selections : a way to avoid pseudo neutral TV lounge of any regular museum video shows.

The exhibition will be accompanied with a publication featuring texts by curator Anne Dressen, artist and art historian Bettina Funcke, artist Tino Seghal, film theorist Nicole Brenez, Label director Jean René Etienne, art critic Benjamin Thorel and a interview of Kim Gordon by music critic Marie Pierre Bonniol, as well as a series of peripheral events (special screenings, tv channel and/or internet broadcasting, live performances) on and off site…

Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! plays with the title of a former exhibition presented at Kunstverein München in 1994: Oh Boy, It's a Girl! This exhibition paved the way for a newly emerging debate on gender politics in contemporary art in Germany by amending the traditional frame of feminist criticism of social gender hierarchies and representations with a general perspective on the performative ‘nature’ of sexualized identities and social norms. In other words, the Oh Boy, It’s a Girl! did not only deal with ‘feminisms in art’, but also with a ‘feminism without women’ (Leo Bersani), which was thrown into relief through gender-travesties, gay politics and the deconstruction of normative structures of desire.

Almost 15 years later, the exhibition Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! attempts to reconsider, question and reevaluate the central aspects of the then underlying debates on ’gender politics’ and ’gender studies’ in the face of a changed and changing political present. Central for the re-staging of these debates in Oh Girl, It's a Boy! is the conflict between the fight for recognition and integration, on one hand, and the protection of ’identitary difference’ on the other. Thisset of political problems is also reflected on the level of aesthetic rhetorics. Has the successful struggle for recognition and integration displaced difference as a value? Or has the category of the deviation as a political instrument become obsolete, not to the least because it has turned out to be an indispensable marketing-tool of the present lifestyle-economies? What political value could then a new notion of ’queerness’ have as a ’political metaphor without a stable referent’ (David L. Eng)?

The exhibition Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! attempts to polemicize and problematize between achievement and loss: How can difference be articulated, if the position from which it could be practised has long ago been incorporated into the social mainstream? In what way could such a position be re-imagined in the context of current conditions? What vocabularies of articulation could thus resist today’s omnipresent dynamics of integration as an expression of incommensurable desire? Oh Girl, It’s a Boy! will move within the tension between opacity and transparency, refusal and mediation, the struggle for difference and the fight for recognition, in order understand and question the shifts and repositionings of contemporary gender politics.

La Otra is a pioneer in Latin America in breaking the traditional mold of an art fair, and becoming a new space for the exchange, dissemination and support of new proposals. The space for the realization of the fair is an industrial building of the 50s, former headquarters of a major publishing house. The building is located in La Macarena/Bosque Izquierdo, Bogota's cool and bohemian neighbourhood. This event is organized by Galeria Valenzuela Klenner (www.vkgaleria.com), the most important and avant garde gallery in the contemporary Colombian scene.Blow de la Barra will be exhibiting works by Stefan Bruggemann, Federico Herrero, Los Super Elegantes, Matthieu Laurette, Carolina Caycedo, Miltos Manetas, SUPERM, Carla Zaccagnini, and Eduardo Consuegra.

Monday, 15 October 2007

Against the remarkable backdrop of Burne-Jones Boticelli’s Primavera tapestry, William Morris’ carpets, Van Dyck portraits and Gimson’s magnificent chandeliers Los Super Elegantes latest video takes us to the heart of the English countryside in Cotswold. Surrounded by the relics of the Arts and Crafts heritage, Fla and Flu follows a charming yet decadent aristocrat couple occupied in their daily tasks, from taking a stroll to the nearby cemetery to wandering around the stable. The slow and melodic rhythm of the music that accompanies the main characters throughout the day abruptly breaks up into funk carioca when the night falls and all the guests arrive to join a banquette crammed with an exquisite repertoire of friends that will brighten up the evening.

Strained in a world of their own, Fla and Flu recalls the claustrophobic atmosphere of Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, which was originally conceived to be filmed in England. The video clip masters the art of pastiche introducing constant allusions to other iconic films. With its extraordinary settings and the eccentricity of all the characters that drop in and out the scene, Fla and Flu constitutes a fabulous account of quintessential, aristocratic and eccentric English country life.

EXHIBITIONS, PROJECTS AND TEXTS BY PLB

ABOUT ME

"At the end of the fifteenth of his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind' Schiller states a paradox and makes a promise. He declares that ‘Man is only completely human when he plays’, and assures us that this paradox is capable ‘of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living’. We could reformulate this thought as follows: there exists a specific sensory experience—the aesthetic—that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community. There are different ways of coming to terms with this statement and this promise. You can say that they virtually define the ‘aesthetic illusion’ as a device which merely serves to mask the reality that aesthetic judgement is structured by class domination. In my view that is not the most productive approach..." from
Jacques Rancier, 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes', New Left Review 14, April-March 2002

SHORT BIO

Pablo León de la Barra is an exhibition maker, independent curator and researcher. He was born in Mexico City in 1972. León de la Barra has a PhD in History and Theories from the Architectural Association, London. He has curated among other exhibitions ‘To Be Political it Has to Look Nice’ (2003) at apexart and Art in General in New York; ‘PR04 Biennale’ (2004, co-curator) in Puerto Rico; ‘George and Dragon at ICA’ (2005) at the ICA-London; ‘Glory Hole’ (2006) at the Architecture Foundation-London; ‘Sueño de Casa Propia’(2007-2008, in collaboration with Maria Ines Rodriguez) at Centre de Art Contemporaine-Geneve, Casa Encendida-Madrid, Casa del Lago-Mexico City, and Cordoba, Spain; ‘This Is Not America’ at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2009); ‘Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at the CCE in Guatemala (2010); ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, Cerith Wyn Evans at Casa Barragan, Mexico City (2010); ‘Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2011); 'Bananas is my Business: the Southamerican Way' at Museu Carmen Miranda, Rio de Janeiro (co-curated with Julieta Gonzalez, 2011); 'MicroclimaS' at Kunsthalle Zurich (2012); 'Esquemas para una Oda Tropical', Rio de Janeiro, 2012; 'Marta 'Che' Traba' at Museo La Ene, Buenos Aires (2012); Novo Museo Tropical at Teoretica, San Jose, Costa Rica (2012); Museu Labirinto / Museum of Unlimited Growth, ArtRio, Rio de Janeiro (2012); The Camino Real Arcades, Lima, Peru (2012). PLB has acted as advisor and/or art curator for the following art fairs: Pinta/London (2010-12), Maco/Mexico (2009-1012), Circa/Puerto Rico (2010), La Otra/Bogota (2009), ArteBA/ Buenos Aires (2012), ArtRio/Rio de Janeiro (2011-2013). León de la Barra has written amongst other publications for: Frog/Paris, PinUp/New York, Purple/Paris, Spike/Austria, Tar/Italy, Wallpaper/London, Celeste/Mexico, Tomo/Mexico, Rufino/Mexico, Ramona/Buenos Aires, Metropolis M/Amsterdam, Numero Cero/Puerto Rico. PLB has also written texts for many artists and exhibition catalogues, lectured internationally and participated in many international symposiums where relevant topics to arts, culture and society have been discussed. PLB was co-director of ‘24-7’ an artists-curatorial collective in London from 2002-2005 and artistic director of ‘Blow de la Barra’ in London from 2005-2008. From 2005 to 2012 he was curator of the White Cubicle Gallery in London, a community art space which he also founded. He is also founder of the Novo Museo Tropical, a museum yet to physically exist somewhere in the tropics and curated the First Bienal Tropical in San Juan Puerto Rico (2011). He is also the publisher of Pablo Internacional Editions and editor of his own blog the Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution. He lives and works between London, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, San Juan, Bogota, Lima, Athens, Beirut...